If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Unanswered: Visual Foxpro or MS Access

Hello,
for my work i need pro-arguments to use Visual Foxpro and not MS Access? What's the best program to work with big data tables (800.000 rec.)? I just use Visual Foxpro to query and replace records in a big table (it's an alternative for Microsoft Excel because Excel has a limit of 65.536 rec.).

The first and probably best argument I can come up with is that's what VFP (or even Foxbase/Foxpro) were made for. Relation Database Management Systems. They handle data with ease.
When you start dealing with large tables, say 100,000 records or so, you will start spending a lot of time searching, ordering, querying, waiting, etc., for Access. VFP outperforms Access exponentially.

Don't you want to look into a centralized RDBMS solution?

May be you should look into a centralized database solution such as SQL Server. If you won't have more than 5 concurrent users, you can go with MSDE 2000 which is free. It's basically a toned down version of SQL Server 2000.

That's what I use in situations where I don't need a lot of users connecting to a database. Plus, if you ever wanted to scale up to SQL Server some day, going from MSDE to SQL Server is a breeze.

VFP is a VERY robust programming language / DBMS. It works well with large datasets but it does have its limitations... mainly a 2Gb table limit. If you forsee a need of a table getting larger than 2Gb then I would strongly reccomend SQL Server. I would then reccomend using VFP to access the data because of VFPs EXTENSIVE data capabilities. VFP is an ALL-IN-ONE package (stated loosly) as it depends on external programs for only a few things.